The Roswell Slides

The “Roswell Slides” are images that a group of UFO promoters – including Anthony Bragalia, Jaime Maussan, Adam Dew, Donald Schmitt, Tom Carey, and Richard Dolan – put forward at an event held on May 5, 2015, in Mexico City, as proof positive of an extraterrestrial crash at Roswell in 1947 and the recovery and cover-up by the US government of alien bodies. These are claims that most of the aforementioned group have been making for over two years now. They have repeatedly said that the best experts they could find were examining the slides, and that they had determined the slides showed a creature that was of unearthly origin.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As many skeptics have been saying since the first rough image of one of the slides was procured several months ago as a screen capture from a promotional video released by Dew, the figure photographed and shown in the slides is almost certainly a mummified body.

We can now remove the word “almost” from the aforementioned sentence. The key to solving the mystery was in the placard seen in the slides in front of the body, a placard that the slides promoters assured everyone could not be deciphered despite extensive examination. Here is what Don Schmitt said on April 12, 2015:

This will be part of the event, part of the program in May, that all of these analytical reports, all of the analyses, all of the main experts as well as the photographic experts who examined- there’s a placard, very fuzzy, that can not be legibly read by the naked eye, yet we’ve had everyone from Dr. David Rudiak, to Studio MacBeth, even the Photo Interpretation Department of the Pentagon, as well as Adobe have all told us that it’s beyond the pale, that it cannot be read, it is totally up to interpretation.So, we truly feel we have performed due diligence; we have done everything we can to substantiate and prove what is contained within these slides, whether it is something of a human malady or something truly extraordinary.

It took us just a few hours to prove otherwise, once we received a high resolution copy of one of the slides (note: while our copy came from an inside source within the promoters’ group, slides promoter Adam Dew has now released it as well).

Deblurred image from original slide(not photoshopped in any way other than a slight increase in contrast to help bring out the words that are clearly on the placard.)

By using the commercially available SmartDeblur, a member of our group (Nab Lator), was able to significantly clear up the blurred text. Other members of the group helped narrow down the actual words.The first line was the most clearly resolved:

MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY

There is no reasonable doubt that this is the true and correct text.

The other three lines of the text are more difficult to decipher, but seem to say something like:

MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY At the time of burial the body was clothed in a xxx-xxx cotton shirt. Burial wrappings consisted of three small cotton blankets. Loaned by the MR. Xxxxxx, San Francisco, California

The entire effort only took hours, quite a difference from the “years” of research claimed by the slides promoters. The fact that the promoters did not release proper high resolution scans of the slides made our work more difficult, but in the end it was still relatively easy to decipher the key parts of the image.

The mystery of the placard is solved, and so is the nature of the body.

It was a boy, from Earth.

The question that remains is whether or not the Slides promoters have been deliberately deceiving the public in order to profit financially, or whether they were simply incompetent. Perhaps it was a mixture of both. Either way, their credibility as investigators and researchers has been destroyed.

Thanks to our colleagues and associates Alejandro Espino, “Trained Observer”, Philippe Hernandez, Aaron John Gulyas, Irna France, Nick Redfern, and Fin Handley, as well as many, many more who offered help.

An extract from the above:
The figure has confused many people due to its alien appearance. The large head and small facial features conjure pop-culture depictions of extraterrestrials, and the body’s battered condition suggests that there may have been some sort of crash or collision prior to the photo being taken.

One explanation, however, suggests that the figure in the photo spent its entire existence right here on earth. Cranial deformation, or the forced molding of a child’s skull while it is still soft and malleable, is a widely known practice among indigenous populations in the Americas. Bodies with deformed skulls have been unearthed by archaeologists for years, and people have mistaken them for aliens for just as long. In 2012, archaeologists in Mexico came across a burial ground containing twenty-five skeletons. More than half of these bodies showed evidence of intentional skull deformation.

Most people are unfamiliar with common mummification processes, which are used to preserve bodies after death in many cultures. In popular culture, mummies are characterized by their head-to-toe bandage suit, and are often possessed by some supernatural force that animates the lifeless bodies.
Babies’ heads are typically dis-proportionally large compared with the rest of their bodies, lending to the non-human appearance of the body in the photos. It is easy to see how many might mistake the bizarre-looking mummified youngster as something from another world. Popular culture is largely responsible for the confusion surrounding the photos, having depicted the slender, big-headed aliens in film, television, and print for decades.

I knew it was faked, and the guys who promoted this crap have damaged the UFO field 100%. No wonder everyone laffs at this so-called field of Ufology. The first red flag for me was that Don’s & Cary’s website, The Roswell Investigator, had NOTHING on this at all!!!! Not one single word on the Roswell Slides as one would expect. And it s/have had articles, and their views on them, but no, there was nothing on their website. Hey, you guys did GREAT! Thanks!

I am often asked why I don’t participate more in the UFO community. Things like this are why? People are so eager to believe that their ability to discriminate is compromised. In this case, though, it looks like something even worse than that. Very disappointing. I must thank you guys for doing a great job! It’s the lead story on Unknowncountry today. (May 9. 2015)

Thank you, Whitley, for all the work you did in our field (I mean “ufology”).
I’m a modest French ufologist, and I always loved your books (even outside ‘Communion’ descent – like ‘War Day’ and ‘Wolfen’).
btw, Excuse my English, it’s not my native language).
I am going to read ‘Unknown Country’ to-night.

This is categorically untrue. The only change made to their own original as presented online was an increase in the contrast to accentuate the actual letters on the page (which were deblurred using simple commercially available software). Nothing was added by us.

Kudos! Thank you all for your hard work. Let’s hope Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, Adam Dew, Jaimie Maussan, Richard Dolan, Anthony Bragalia, and the rest of the hucksters, slither off under a rock and never show their faces again.

If we can get the exact same image you used, we can do the same procedure on it using SmartDeblur. We also have access to some high end software, so we might well be able to read the whole thing. If you’re on, either send me the image via a Dropbox link or email to me at whitley@strieber.com. I have seen some of the comments, and this needs to be put to bed.

It’s funny to hear Whitley Strieber say the matter ‘needs to be put to bed’, then turn around and try to put the alien body idea back in play by following where Linda Moulton Howe breathlessly dares to lead (e.g. fake Serpo, fake CARET/drones). See his website unknowncountry.com.

Without saying whether the body *clearly established to be a museum piece* is a mummy or a misidentified alien body, it’s a valid question whether it’s even worth looking further when Maussan has an obvious vested interest, Howe has almost no credibility, and Strieber is willing to follow Howe anywhere while also trying to drum up listeners (this week’s Dreamland is “The Most Astonishing Dreamland I have Ever Done”–Whitley Strieber” just like every other week.)

Then when you read Strieber’s Journal piece(s) on it where he tries to bring in obscure principles in physics to basically keep the slides in play – how is this not pure obscurantism? The slides are not ‘ambiguous’. Their creation appears to have been totally mundane. The only ‘ambiguity’ in this case comes because no one did their due diligence. Maussan et al. didn’t even think to do deblurring, which these other guys did pretty easily – probably because they were too busy amping themselves up on the images being of the ‘Roswell Alien’. And it also didn’t occur to them that the photos were taken in a museum and not a government lab.

And now Strieber wants to ‘put to bed’ the whole thing by asking us to listen to all Maussan’s due diligence consulting anthropologists, etc., without any notice that now the scenario is shifting from Roswell-alien-in-government-lab to Steven Greer-style Atacama alien…

Nice work, gentlemen. I particularly appreciated the demonstration of the process, as you took responsibility to show that professional research requires such protocol. Well done, and a good example of open sourced work, available for duplication and subject to rebuttal. Thank you.

Attacking them personally because they attacked you personally? It would be nice to see someone with the ability to take the higher ground here and show a little grace. You’ve made your point with eloquence and outstanding technical work. No one is going to think any more highly of you by stooping to their level, I feel, and whatever they have to say is hardly irrelevant to the innocent bystanders who sank money and reputations into this. They’ll want to now exactly how this happened.

…not sure you addressed any of my points. He could have discovered this information 2 years ago, but that information in the post is still relevant to what you have been trying to achieve in decoding the placard.

“The question that remains is whether or not the Slides promoters have been deliberately deceiving the public”

I wish you the best of luck in finding those answers. But if you want to find them, you will possibly have to stop answering with “irrelevant” whenever their names are mentioned. Eventually, one side is going to have dispense with defaulting to a vitriolic state of mind when encountering the other.

Again, best of luck and my congratulations to the technical people. Goodbye:).

You think I didn’t address your points, I think I did. Bragalia and the rest of them are irrelevant to anything that might have to do with serious research. The question of their complicity in what may well have been a fraud remains. People should hold them to account for all of their statements, misdeeds, and attacks now that we have solved the technical aspects of the case. But thank you for your comments. Whilst we may disagree, the dialogue is part of what we have been doing since the get-go.

And for the record, just in case anyone is wondering, the views I post in my comments are my own. Other team members may or may not disagree with them.

Still pisses me off that Bragalia repeats this lie in his confession: “The data points and the narrative of the slide are all true. The slide stock is from 1947, the very year of the crash.”

Not true at all! As I was told by the technical experts at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography & Film in February, “All that can be verified from the edge printing on slides is the film type. It does not tell when it was manufactured. Kodachrome was introduced in 35mm in 1936. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell when it was exposed or processed.”

In a few weeks I’ll be speaking at the Milwaukee Paranormal Conference, and guess who is speaking at the same event? Dom Schmitt!

Any conference that invites any of the Slides promoters is a conference that should be boycotted. The only way to stop this kind of con is to cut these people off. Otherwise nothing is accomplished in the long run.

AJB also suffers from repetitive tunnel vision about the experts (I guess) willing to assert the mummy was not human, while ignoring the qualified experts who state quite otherwise. I suspect Festinger would have found it fascinating.

That is the film stock date not specific to when the photo was actually taken. So I completely agree with you Mark. Whoever said any thing about it having been taken in 1947 or even in 1949 is just pulling shit out of their asses.

I saw that post and indeed it’s interesting Mr Bragalia could provide that info so quickly as if he had already searched for it. One could see when these low res slides were released it was mummy why pretend it wasn’t?

The ‘Roswell Slides Research Group’ were accused of fraud by Braglalia & Dew, but the RSRG scoundrels didn’t seem to have much of a plan. Are we to understand, that their scheme was to place a nefarious sign on a mummy… labeling it a MUMMY?

“[D]etermined the slides were of unearthly origin..” Somebody ought to clean up the prose here. It was never alleged that the slides were of unearthly origin, but rather that the body seen in the slides was (of unearthly origin).

Even without the deblurring of the placard text (which clinched it), anyone who had access to the image before it’s Grand Reveal ought to have been able to see that the body was in a glass case in what looked like a museum setting with other artifacts (e.g. monkey head) nearby and people strolling around. Hardly some illicitly taken image from inside a government lab, etc.

The fact that Carey and Schmitt can look at these two slides and think ‘Roswell’ and not ‘museum piece’ to me calls into question all of the work they’ve done on Roswell – and on anything else.

By the way, forgot to add that the work you’ve done here with this deblurring is a real public service. We need more of this kind of straightforward follow-up in everything UFO-related. We among the public thank you!

Here’s IMDBPro’s synopsis of the 2015 “Kodachrome” movie: “A documentary about two slides found in a box that show the bodies of what some believe to be aliens. The photos were taken between 1939 and 1946…”

Uh, 1946…? That would be proof right there that the slides are bogus.

There are three people listed on the crew of the film, which is described as a “comedy short.” None of the three people are Adam Dew, and SlideBox Media is not mentioned anywhere in the listing.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, Jaime Maussan’s reputation in the field is such that people should instantly turn a jaundiced eye on ANYTHING he is involved with. On the other hand, Richard Dolan has never, to my knowledge anyway, been associated with outright fraud. I would like to think that SOME, at least, of this group were guilty of nothing more than poor judgment. As to whether that lapse consisted in their examination of the slides themselves or in trusting the statements of one or two colleagues who were motivated by the money to be made out of this I cannot, of course, say.

The REAL blow will be to those honest (if rather overenthusiastic) UFO Believers who have replaced God with “Space Friends” and Calvary with Roswell. To THEM this let-down will be painful indeed. They TRUSTED these men and paid their money because they had been told that this would prove the “Roswell Crash” once and for all.

Now that it has done the exact opposite and now that people are laughing at the “gullibility” of the UFO Community in general I am sure that many of them are heartbroken indeed and my sympathy goes out to them. You aren’t gullible, my friends. Or no more than most of us. You truly believe that there is intelligent life “out there”. So do I. So do most people, in fact, according to the polls. You believe that Roswell happened. You may be right. This debacle doesn’t prove it didn’t. It just leaves us where we were before.

By all means, continue to believe. But take one lesson from this. The tagline for the X Files movie was “I want to believe.” I suggest you substitute another line made famous by that show:
“Trust no one.” Don’t be so free with your money and your trust in the so-called “experts”. Don’t let anyone sell you a bill of goods even (or especially) when it is a bill of goods you desperately WANT to believe is real.

Take every claim (no matter by WHOM it may be made) with a grain of salt. There are too many out there who are too happy to bilk you because they have no heart, these people. They have no soul. All they have are dollar signs in their eyes.

Paul Kimball is very intelligent, a pain in the ass for hoaxers, thanks – without Your clever mind
this scam would never had ended.
All credits goes to Mr Paul Kimball and the team, but I belive Paul was the person who ignite the fire.

Thanks for the kind words, but while I was at the forefront of bashing the promoters publicly for some time (along with Lance Moody, Curt Collins, Tim Printy and Gilles Fernandes), others did the heavy lifting when the real work had to be done – particularly French skeptic Nab Lator, who did the initial de-blurring, followed by Tim and Lance confirming his work. It was a true team effort – indeed, I actually left the team for a while to focus on the real world, and only cam back towards the end when the de-blurring was taking place. So credit goes to all in equal measure!

A paragraph on this web page describes S.L. Palmer’s and his family’s visit to Montezuma Castle with Richard Wetherill, during which they dug up the child mummy. It confirms that Palmer indeed took it with him. It’s also possible that his son S.L. Palmer Jr, whom the placard states was the one who brought the body to the Park Museum in 1938, was present on this trip in 1896.

S.L. Palmer Jr just may have been Sidney L. Palmer, a resident of San Francisco whose metallurgical patents from the 1930s and ’40s state that he worked as Assignor to the American Smelting and Refining Co., N.Y. Here is an example:

Note the text at the first link says S. L. Palmer while the footnote indicates the son as S. J. Palmer, Jr.: “8. S. J. Palmer Jr., “Montezuma Castle in 1896,” _Southwestern National Monuments_, supplement (January 1940), 63.”
Also, the photograph there actually provides the archaeological situation of the mummified boy when the text is consulted: it’s on the ledge up there by the topmost ladder. My sense is that the actual location is near the very top of the structure where the top of the cave becomes visible: look at the two post-holes above Palmer Sr.’s head in the close-up detailed photograph then look for those post holes in the larger picture and for the alcove space out of which the wife and son are peeking. The best candidate for that seems to me to be that gap in the highest wall, but perhaps someone with better knowledge of the site would know instantly exactly where it was.

Right – so Palmer Jr was there, and it was he who later in life wrote a piece about the outing in 1896 and his father’s exploit. One might guess he probably felt bad about what amounted to grave robbery and wanted to make amends by returning the body to the local authority.

And to speculate, if S.L. Palmer Jr is in fact identical to the San Francisco-based Sidney L. Palmer, who worked for a N.Y. smelting company, he might well have had professional contacts with a field geologist like Bernard Ray and a land rights lawyer like Hilda Ray…

SL Palmer Jr.(1883-1949) was the brother in law of Richard Wetherill (1858-1910), who discovered the mummy circa spring 1896.
He was married to Marietta Wetherill.
The mummy may have been given by Richard Wetherill to SL Palmer (senior 1854-?).
Then, in 1938 SL Palmer Jr loaned the mummy to Mesa Verde Museum.

This boy mummy never had any name.
In 1939, the Mesa Verde museum received another mummy, “Esther”, previously at the University of Colorado Museum, which had some success for the public.
Both mummies were stored away from public and stored in the 80’s.
There are chanced they have been buried, but this need confirmation.

Hey,
Good job on this one Guys,
The UFO community should get together and create an organization that has to be a membership driven nonprofit that have a group of unbiased expert researchers like these guys have proven to be. Design the organizations membership so that if you have a ufo related artifact of any type released to the world media it has to be submitted to the researchers of the orginazation for its authenticity grade. Have the standards set up so the submitted item won’t be considered worthy of release to the media if it doesn’t meet the standards of the grading system. Like they grade & certify coins.
Hell, think about it, if it was your million dollars invested into the Mexico City unveiling & you found out the item was not what you thought it was, what would you do?
A.) announce its not real to everyone and just suck up the million dollar loss or
B) let the event happen so you get your million back and wait a week & slowly leak out the newly found evidence.
Truth be known, this is a great lesson for the entire UFO community. The lesson has enough sting to it when you invested money into believing a item to be real that’s put forth by, anyone, anywhere. They will only put their hand on a hot stove eye one time. The next time a really good set of photos or relic comes along, it will be researched a whole lot more before someone runs down and buys tickets to see the big evidence release event that hasn’t been carefully cruntized by theirselves or an official unbiased grading organization

Where are the other slides and what is on those slides that I can’t seem to locate anywhere online? Anyone got a www on where I can see the other slides and what is on them. The content of what is on those slides is what will tell if this was a set up from the get go.

“My remarks will have nothing to do with the authenticity of the slides, or their alleged lack thereof. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to jump in, and it’s a debate that others can engage in. The event will either be history in the making, a much-ballyhooed flop, or — most likely, I am thinking — something in between, where there will continue to be important unresolved questions concerning the slides. Not enough for either a homerun or a strikeout. We shall see. In any case, I think I will appreciate getting an up-close perspective on all this.”

I more or less shared his expectations about the event expressed in the above quote (not a homerun nor a strikeout), but it turned out to be a ‘much-ballyhooed flop’. The fact that he considered the possibility the event would be a flop also shows he had very little information available himself to make a judgement. Apart from attending the BeWitness event and giving a speech etc. it seems that for the rest Dolan was just as much a bystander as everybody else.

So in Dolan’s case I would find it rather unfair to say he lost all credibility because of his minor involvement in what turned out to be this fiasco.

Yes, that’s definitely the party line from Dolan, Inc., which seeks to minimize his role in selling the event beforehand. What he said afterward is irrelevant, other than as back-peddling… have a look at what he was saying beforehand.

I don’t know everything he said before the event, but what I get from his March 8th article is that he was not involved in the actual investigation and didn’t have access to the data. Apparently the members of the ‘dream team’ made the whole thing seem convincing enough for him to come to the event, give a speech etc. It seems to me that he just followed his curiosity and approached it like: let’s see what happens, without jumping to conclusions. So I think his role actually wasn’t that big.

The actual researchers obviously fucked up big time, but as to the curious participants… My feeling is there needs to be some room to get into something that seems promising and then find out it’s nothing.

I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Dolan’s statements prior to the event were much more enthusiastic and were used by the promoters, as was his very presence, to help sell tickets. That is, after all, why he was asked to be there. Other UFO researchers, including Stan Friedman, had the good sense to stay away. But Dolan went, when he should have known better, and he lauded both the organizers and the slides in public statements. He is complicit (although not to the degree of some), and must be held accountable.

I feel compelled to THANK YOU all on your site for breaking this latest attempt at insulting the people’s intelligence… Now if we could just get critical thought and genuine research going again we might discover something of value related to this very real phenom.

The whole thing about this alien body saga is that – supposedly – dead alien bodies exist but are hidden by certain government groups who will deny the existence of the bodies and make it impossible to access the bodies.

For the sake of argument, suppose this is actually the situation, and these restrictions are unbreakable, is there anything else that you would consider ‘credible evidence that points to dead alien bodies’? Like for example documents, credible witnesses, photos or whatever?

Quite simply, Simon, no (other members of the RSRG may well disagree). Sagan was right – extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a claim doesn’t get much more extraordinary than a dead alien being kept on ice by the government. Photos, documents, etc. can all be faked (MJ-12 being a perfect example). “Witnesses” might at first seem credible, but in UFO world I’ve never run across one that talks of bodies who has withstood close scrutiny. So if you want to convince the vast majority of reasonable people that the government has a dead alien from a crashed flying saucer, you will have to produce the dead alien.

Just to play the Devils Advocate. Assuming that there were in reality dead alien bodies in existence, somewhere, hidden by some super secret governmental entity, can we actually, really think that any such evidence as photos or document for that matter, would be allowed to slip through the cracks? I don’t think so! Perhaps the people behind this travesty should have thought about that.

It’s very easy to cover up physical evidence. Just put it in a vault and it will stay there. It’s almost impossible to make involved people shut up forever, but then again it’s also very easy to simply lie about the existence of evidence and ridicule anyone who claims it does exist.

All we as outsiders observe is people claiming to have seen stuff like dead alien bodies, recovered flying saucers etc. etc. Of course it’s very hard to prove if any of these people are telling the truth or not, because any place where the proof could be is totally off limits so it’s practically impossible to check whether the proof actually exists.

As opposed to any ‘normal’ scientific field in which an ‘open’ study is possible, the field of ufology is frustrated by heavy restrictions, filthy politics, ridicule, lies and delusions etc. A hell of a lot of people are simply not telling the truth, whether on purpose or not, which makes it very hard to make progress.

I can imagine in a couple of centuries people will laugh their ass of when they look back at this whole pathetic saga.

Having researched the Roswell case in detail and having seen their flawed research methodooogies first hand, this comes as no surprise. They lost all objectivity years ago from my vantage point and have been promoted without careful scrutiny. This has always been about making money, not legitimate balanced scholarly research. I have been very vocal about uncovering fraud over the years and this is no exception. But, the simple truth is that this type of deception and self delusion occurs on both sides of the isle. Objectivity is very hard to maintain within a system challenging ones own beliefs and those of others. VG

Again, it is not the government spreading misinformation and deception – it is our own UFO community doing it to ourselves. It’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound people! The best way to contain this cancer in the UFO research community is to stop supporting individuals that affiliate themselves with and promote such utter nonsense. Don’t invite them on radio or TV shows; don’t invite them to speak at UFO conferences; don’t purchase any books authored by them. If they don’t have an audience, they will just go away and clear a path for credible researchers. I am personally disappointed by two researchers in particular who promoted this, since I felt they were much more intelligent and credible than this. Lesson learned!